Make it less emotional
Ashleigh HamblingAccount Executive, Serendata“We try to make it less emotional” was the perspective of a transformation director I was recently speaking with about business readiness.
His steer was that, if training is complete, and comms have been sent, then you’ve done everything you can ahead of go‑live. The work then comes when the support tickets start rolling in and the noise gets louder from the business. And I get his point, there is always going to be some work to do post go‑live, it’s almost unavoidable. But would you not rather do as much as you can ahead of time, so that productivity doesn’t completely flat line on day 1.
I remember when we were in the throes of the transition from the UK's Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) system to the Customs Declaration Service (CDS) ... super users, training, comms galore, but what happened on Day 1 .... a WHOLE LOT of workarounds. We even encouraged the team to use workarounds, because you can’t have a lorry driver sat on the dock, unable to complete customs clearance, incurring demurrage or storage charges because the team doesn’t know how to use the new system. A couple of the team had to work through the night (for two weeks) to get priority loads cleared.
Had change managers tracked business sentiment over time, there would have been visibility of how people were feeling, how (in)effective training had been and whether more change support was needed. A bit more of an emotional temperature check would have screamed - people risk has not been mitigated! And would have avoided the chaos and productivity dip the ensued post-cut over.
We know that not everyone loves surveys and there’s debate around how effective they are at capturing audience sentiment ... but what if your change team faciliated conversations to capture sentiment information in a standardised format.
By asking the same questions of your end users at each phase, and logging them in a set structure, you’d be armed with a solid reporting view of the ‘emotional stuff’ which translates into organisational readiness. This means you can get ahead of people risk, and give yourself more time for additonal change support, if and where it’s needed.
Even if you don’t track them, people’s emotions will always affect speed to value and benefit realisation. Emotions are hard to capture, but if you can standardise the way you capture those emotions, then you’re empowered with data to make delivery decisions.
Encourage your change managers to facilitate conversations in survey format if faceless surveys are met with silence.
People trust them more than another email or notifaction.
Track sentiment and business readiness over time, so that you can focus additional support in the right places, to keep the cost of delivery down.